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Twenty-five years ago, I started writing a novel, and the process of developing the main character and her story world created a crack in my psyche and changed my life forever. I was taken through my own dark night of the soul, which led – gratefully – to my spiritual transformation. Since then, I have been on a spiritual path, have viewed my creative writing practice as a spiritual practice, and have devoted myself and my life to embracing the power of story.

While writers have probably always had an innate sense that stories heal, science has proven the benefits of story in our lives – in both the writing and reading of fiction and non-fiction. Stories are a human need. We crave them. We tell them. Every day. Stories are not only healing to the writer. They carry the power to heal readers and the world at large, as well.

For the Writer

1 – Evoking your imagination while writing a story can lead to improved brain capacity and ease of being in the world.

Using your imagination can improve your problem-solving skills. By troubleshooting a character’s obstacles as she attempts to attain her primary desire, you can become more creative in troubleshooting and solving your own.

Using your imagination can improve your relationships and social interactions. By empathizing with your characters’ problems, you’ll become more aware of the day-to-day struggles of your fellow humans, thus allowing you to be more empathetic in general.

2 – Using the process of amalgamation, which is the act of consciously or unconsciously blending real-life people and events with imaginary people and events for the sake of storytelling, allows us to resolve events from the past.

Recounting stories from our personal past can help us make meaning of what was. By remembering a past event from an older, more experienced – or simply different – perspective can give us a sense of personal power.

Creating a re-telling of a past event and imagining what could have been can also give us a sense of personal power. This is not about denying reality or naively wishing a situation had been different, but more about reframing the story to achieve a sense of redemption or inner harmony.

Using creative license to write about anything from a past personal event to a current cultural phenomenon and creating a fictional story with a positive outcome can give us hope. There is something immensely powerful in being able to imagine a world where change and growth are possible. Believing in a better world and doing what we can to create it helps us find peace in the moment while continuing to put one foot in front of the other with a sense of personal agency toward the project of human evolution.

3 – Through the process of deep character development, we come to understand ourselves on a much deeper level. By creating characters who come off the page and behave like real people rather than flat, cardboard caricatures or stereotypes and getting beneath their skins to examine their true motivations, pains, and fears, we can’t help but do this better for ourselves. Thus, writing stories leads to greater self-awareness and advances us along our paths of personal evolution.

For the Reader

4 – Reading stories gives us a healthy escape from everyday life. Whether we read a memoir about someone’s experience growing up in a small rural community or a fantasy novel about a young woman with superpowers, the descriptions that build the story world evoke our imaginations and bring us the same benefits realized by the writer mentioned above. As Stephen King once wrote, “Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.” Reading stories quiets our minds, much the same way meditation does.

5 – Reading stories – in particular, literature – leads to greater levels of empathy. By riding along beside a character through the ups and downs of his quest to achieve his goal and through the mistakes he makes along the way, we become softened to the struggle of what it means to be human, which allows us to more readily accept and embrace struggle and imperfection in others.

6 – Reading stories can lead to greater human connection. When a reader witnesses an experience like their own, they know they’re not alone in the world, that their life isn’t as taboo as they may think or feel, and through this, they can experience validation, and ultimately, a feeling of connection.

For the World

7 – When writers and readers experience the benefits of story, it up-levels their positive presence in the world. Writing and reading both bring numerous benefits, probably the most far-reaching of which is a greater understanding of the human condition. This understanding can elicit more compassion, more empathy, and ultimately, more peace in the world.

English writer, Alan Moore, known for Watchmen and V for Vendetta, among many others, believes writers are modern day shamans. He describes the magic they work as the alchemical process of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to create story worlds into which readers can enter and experience changes in consciousness.

This journey into story worlds – ours and others’ – allow us to clear our minds. It serves as a salve to our hearts and an elixir to our spirits and souls. If you’re looking for creative ways to further your evolution as a human on earth in this lifetime, embrace the power of story. Write your stories. Share them. And read the stories of others.

So often I hear people say they want to write but they struggle coming up with ideas. That they feel compelled to write at all tells me they already have ideas. It could be that they just don’t know how to get them outside themselves (remember the jar full of frenzied bees?). Or maybe they don’t know how to transform their ideas into a story and execute it. Or maybe they don’t believe anyone would care to read what they have to say. To all of that, I say this…

First of all, believe in yourself. (You can do it!) Second of all, you’d be surprised at the difference sharing your story can make for another person. (Really.) And third of all, if you really believe you’re out of ideas, simply look to your own life and go from there. (Your life is magical, mystical source of fodder.)

I’m not saying that you ought to write personal essay (unless that’s what you want to do) but that you can take snippets from your life and turn them into fictional stories. Treat those snippets like seeds that you can plant (put them on the page – just get them out of your head – and see what starts to sprout), water (stay with it, tend it, and add what’s needed – trust yourself to know), and prune (edit, cut, and relocate). When you commit to the growth of a story, it will grow.

Here are a few examples of events, phases, facets of my life that I can use to create fictional stories…

I had always wanted to experience living in an apartment building and managing it for the benefit of free rent. My personal story didn’t quite go that way – I managed SEVEN buildings (while working two other jobs), and I got a measly $250/month credit on my rent. My romantic fantasy became a horrible reality – the worst job I’ve ever had. (And that’s saying something.)

Upper management was difficult to work with due to systemic dysfunction and a total lack of awareness that change was needed. One person, in particular – the Assistant General Manager with a bull-in-a-china-shop presence who perpetually, even angrily, chomped on a big wad of gum – was consistently rude and dismissive – even cruel. To me. I worked non-stop with no one to give me a break (even though they “sold” the job as one with TONS of flexibility – they lied). Some residents were demanding and rude. Some were lovely. The building was a “charming” old one in downtown and fraught with problems. I also got up close and personal with the homeless problem in ways I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I saw the underbelly of humanity.

I moved into the apartment of the previous, beloved maintenance man who had died just a few months before. Management neglected to tell me he died in the apartment (until I asked). But it all worked out because he left a calming presence in the space. And the maintenance and painting crews were fun guys and treated me well. They were, by far, the best part of the job. Think a Raymond Carver-esque short story.

Just before taking the manager job at the apartments, I lived in an artists’ community. Sounds cool, right? It wasn’t. Rampant disregard for authority by residents who were underdeveloped emotionally and mentally, partially due to the enabling of the manager who was a lovely person as a person I’d want to know outside that context. You can bet that, someday, the people I met there will wind up in a screenplay, as will the four sane people I also met there. Think One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest with art and lots of weed and alcohol.

When I was 11, I came home from school one day. My grandma was there, as usual, and I could tell she had been crying. When I asked her why, she stalled, but I eventually learned that when she arrived at our house that day, she found a note on the kitchen table – It was a narrow sliver of torn, lined paper, just wide enough to accommodate two sentences – from my dad saying he was leaving us. I remember immediately going to my parents’ bedroom closet to find his half of the closet empty except for the several naked dangling hangers. The image of that emptiness was seared into my brain and serves as a metaphor for the emptiness his decision made in my life. While I long ago came to terms with that period of my life, it’s an image I can use to tell a story about family, selfishness, grief, infidelity, insanity, growing up too soon, strength, and more. Think a Joyce Carol Oates-esque short story.

So, if you’re compelled to write a story but can’t think of what to write, take some time to scan through your life and all the experiences you’ve had. You’ll find more ideas than you can handle. To start, make three lists:

Events/phases – like my working as a manager or living in an artists’ community

People – like the brutal Assistant General Manager or the uplifting maintenance crew and painters at the management company, or the enabling but very likeable Manager and “crazy” residents at the artists’ community

Images/objects – like the image of my parents’ half-empty closet and all those meager empty hangers

If you’d rather not write about yourself and your life, spin off from one small thing from your life and see what happens. The truth is… we can tell more truths about humanity through fiction than we can through writing from our life experience, anyway. So free yourself up. Draw from your life, then let your imagination take over. Not only will it free you up, but you also won’t have to concern yourself with being called out on “the facts.”

Give it a try and let me know what you come up with in the comments below.

Imagine a bunch of bumble bees in a jar. The lid’s closed tight, and they want OUT. Frenzied, ricocheting, banging off the sides of the glass, slamming into each other. Getting more and more agitated.

This is your brain when you have TOO MANY ideas and thoughts. This is what happens when you hang on to those thoughts and ideas, thinking you can write it out in your mind, thinking you can figure it all out and have it all in order when you “have time” to get it all on the page.

The truth is, you won’t figure it out UNTIL you get what’s in there onto the page. So set the angry bees free, and do a word dump.

This may very well be my favorite phase of writing. It’s when I get to take all those crazy, frenzied, non-stop, LOUD thoughts in my head and purge them. Word dumping is similar to freewriting, but word dumping is more conscious.

Unload onto the page or screen (keyboard is a-okay for this process) every thought that comes to you about your character, story, scene, or plot without worrying that it makes sense, connects in any meaningful way, or has anything to do with your current plot or character trajectory.

Just get it all out. You can shape it later, much like a potter or a sculptor would. (I know, I’m mixing my metaphors… But you get what I’m getting at. Set the bees free, then throw the clay. All right?!) When a potter sits down at her wheel to start a new piece, she knows that a bowl or a vase or a cup won’t magically appear. She must first throw the clay to have something to work with.

Likewise, Taoists believe that a sculpture already exists in a block of marble and it’s the sculptor’s job to remove what isn’t needed. Get your thoughts outside yourself; then and only then will you be able to know what you’re working with and what you don’t need.

According to Merriam-Webster, amalgamation is “the action or process of uniting or merging two or more things.” This can show up in the merging of businesses, the fusion of two different music styles, and the blending of two cultures.

In the world of writing, amalgamation happens consciously and unconsciously. Some writers intentionally draw from their personal lives, use real situations but change names to protect the innocent (and themselves from being sued), use their home town or state as the milieu for a story, and much more.

For other writers, like me, amalgamation happens unconsciously. It wasn’t until I was partway through the second draft of my in-progress novel, Miranda’s Garden, that I realized Crystal, Miranda’s (my main character’s) neighbor, is an amalgamation of both of my grandmothers. And I realized Miranda’s husband, Len, was an amalgamation of my first and second husbands and my cousin, Keith. I also consciously use Illinois and Colorado as settings for the story because I’ve lived in both areas long enough to be able to write about the terrain and because cornfields and mountains play an important part in the story, as metaphor.

An excellent example of a current author who uses amalgamation – and acknowledges it (although I’ve never read that he’s used this word to describe it) – is James Frey. Frey was in Portland recently talking about his newest book, Katerina. While at Powell’s City of Books, he indicated that he did, in fact, go to Paris in his early 20s to write and he did, in fact, date a model named Katerina, just like the character in the book. He said he also made up stuff.

You may recall Frey from the 2006 debacle when he and his book, A Million Little Pieces, rose to fame as a beacon of recovery after landing on Oprah’s Book Club list and was then knocked off her pedestal after it was discovered parts of the book were fictionalized. This unfortunate turn of events came about for a few reasons: Frey had used real-life events and embellished, Frey’s publisher thought it best to position the book as a memoir, and Oprah – to spare her precious ego and because she was clueless about how literary genres function – came out like God on the Day of Reckoning to publicly castigate and shame Frey.

This cluelessness is common, and I’ve seen it a lot after sharing my work and while attending public readings and exhibitions of others. Some readers/listeners/viewers feel the need to pry into the “truthfulness” of a story – even when that story is deemed fictional. Many will assume that the use of the first person “I” indicates a story about the writer. Or if the story is presented in third person point of view, there’s often the sly, “This is really about you, isn’t it?”

When I screened my feature film, Found Objects, some people commented on the similarities between the main character in the story and me. Yes, she was a creative soul who had lost herself in the domestic sphere of the nuclear family consisting of a husband and three kids. Yes, I drew from a couple of incidents – like the day my son, Spencer, came home from school and said he’d learned that physical touch can help us live longer (which from then on, for a long, long time, led to him saying, “Hey, mom, I wanna live longer” whenever he wanted a hug). And yes, the husband had wanted to be an architect, just like mine had, which I chose to use only because it aligned well with my use of houses and spaces as metaphors for our Selves. The rest was a story about a character that grew in my mind, became her own person, and had her own story to tell.

One of my professors from grad school had the perfect comeback for the is-this-about-you question: “Will knowing this allow you to take in the work differently?” In my experience, the answer has always been ‘no’.

Those who understand how the creative process works understand that whether we’re writing about ourselves or not is immaterial. It’s the story – the work – and its emotional impact that matter. In a world so fraught with accusations about what’s fake and what’s real, we must remember that, in many (most?) cases, truthfulness is subjective. If you and I live an event, we’ll both have different truths about it and what it means. As Albert Camus said, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.”

Whether we’re writing fiction or memoir, you can bet there’s a complex blend of “lies” and truths. Memoirists often condense events and timelines, and they conflate characters. These decisions are usually done for the sake of economy of language among other reasons. Does it matter if a memoir isn’t completely factual? I don’t think so. Of course, there are ways to let readers know when we’ve made adjustments to “reality” (a note at the front of the book will suffice) if that’s important to you. But this is for every writer to decide.

When deciding whether or not I deem a book “good,” I don’t care much about the conventions of formatting or doing things “by the book,” and I won’t take the time to sleuth about to find out if the author did her/his research (for fiction) or lived through an event in the book (for memoir). For me, what matters most is the emotional truthfulness of a story. If I read a book – fiction or memoir – and it touches me, resonates with me, and stays with me for days, I’m satisfied.

So… put the heart of your story first. Tell it with all the emotional truthfulness you and your main character can gather. Then decide how much you want or need to stick to the “facts.” It’s yours to tell.

“I assure you, all of my novels were first-rate before they were written.”
– Virginia Woolf

I’m sure most – if not all – of us can relate to this statement. The idea comes, the characters take shape, we start hearing dialogue, and the setting comes into view. We sit down, we write, and when we read our words a few days later, it feels flat. Or like it’s missing something but we don’t know what, exactly.

We start to have doubts. About our initial idea. About our writing. About ourselves. We can start to question whether or not we should proceed – at the very least, with this new idea – and at the very worst – with writing at all. Ever. We lapse into self-flagellation, even if only metaphorically.

It’s easy for imposter syndrome to set in. And it’s easy to compare our “less-than” prose to all those polished, finished, printed books on the bookstore shelf. We believe we don’t – maybe even, can’t – measure up.

You’ve become enmeshed with your work, much like a person who’s become enmeshed in a relationship. You can’t find the edges of yourself. (Where do you end and the writing (or the other person) begin?) It feels icky. It feels claustrophobic. It’s unhealthy.

What matters most is that you just keep moving forward. Keep massaging the idea and the story and the character, and like a bound-up muscle, it will start to relax. In subsequent drafts (and it could mean – almost always means – A LOT of drafts), you may just start to see a glimmer of the brilliance that first came to you.

And always remember Virginia’s quote: For most of us – even the greats – the original idea may always feel like a dream.